Daily Tech News 2 December 2024

• After Broadcom bought VMWare, there were numerous stories of smaller customers being pushed to the wayside. Broadcom's general approach to marketing products is to have 600 customers and ignore everyone else.
  
  Broadcom now seems to be experimenting with pushing everyone to the wayside. (The Register)
  
  Court filings in a suit from AT&T say that Broadcom sought to increase prices by 1050% while also blocking its reseller channel from doing business with AT&T at all.
  
  AT&T says that the proposed pricing makes the payoff time for moving from VMWare to literally anything else short enough that they see it as an investment rather than an expense.

• A Chicago lab scooped up $83 million in federal payments for fake COVID tests. (Ars Technica)
  
  The DOJ gave the lab owner a deal where he pled guilty to a single count of wire fraud.
  
  I wonder who he knows.
  
  
  
• AMD's Epyc 8004 embedded server family is here. (Serve the Home)
  
  I'm not sure what makes these specifically embedded, as they're socketed and work just fine in conventional rackmount servers.
  
  These are lower-end and cheaper than the 9004 series, with 6 memory channels and 96 lanes of PCIe 5.0.
  
  The processors are only available configured with Zen 4c cores, which are slower and use less power than Zen 4. Not a lot slower in a server CPU; these are clocked at 3GHz where Zen 4 chips run at up to 3.6GHz.
  
  Prices start at $409 for an 8 core chip, and range through $855 for 24 cores, up to $4950 for 64 cores.
  
  The 24 core model looks good if your needs lean more towards memory capacity or I/O bandwidth than CPU performance, since it would be slower than a 16 core desktop chip.
  
  Even the 64 core version only draws 200W, which is another advantage.
  
  
  
• Microsoft Copilot can now read your screen and talk to you. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Not if you uninstall it.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:21 AM

| Access Comments